A light cable-driven manipulator developed for aerial robots: Structure design and control research

To effectively reduce the mass and simplify the structure of traditional aerial manipulators, we propose novel light cable-driven manipulator for the aerial robots in this article. The drive motors and corresponding reducers are removed from the joints to the base; meanwhile, force and motion are transmitted remotely through cables. Thanks to this design, the moving mass has been greatly reduced. In the meantime, the application of cable-driven technology also brings about extra difficulties for high-precise control of cable-driven manipulators. Hence, we design a nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller using time-delay estimation. The time-delay estimation is applied to obtain lumped system dynamics and found an attractive model-free scheme, while the nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller is utilized to enhance the control performance. Stability is analyzed based on Lyapunov theory. Finally, the designed light cable-driven manipulator and presented time-delay estimation-based nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller are analyzed. Corresponding results show that (1) our proposed cable-driven manipulator has high load to mass ratio of 0.8 if we only consider the moving mass and (2) our proposed time-delay estimation-based nonsingular terminal sliding mode is model-free and can provide higher accuracy than the widely used time-delay estimation-based proportional–derivative (PD) controller.